Altitude Challenges
Road building at altitude had its own challenges
Work began in September of 1931 and only stopped when forced to by the weather. On the plateau, that meant when the ground froze. But since the switchbacks were solid rock, frozen ground didn’t make a difference–only high winds, cold and snow shut the crew down. As Mrs. Knox tells it, “The last three days of August it snowed. After that, winter came fast and furious. The amount of clothing the men wore was almost unbelievable. How they could ever work after they got up on the job was a source of wonder to me. It was almost unbearable but time was getting short and the job had to be finished. My husband would come home at night almost frozen. His hands, after being clasped around the levers all day, could hardly be straightened out. He wore several pairs of gloves covered by a huge pair of leather sheep-lined mitts. After he dressed for work he moved about like a mechanical man, he was so stuffed.”
In 1934, records show that the men were paid $1/hr for skilled labor, down to $.60/hour for unskilled. In bad winter weather, they got an additional ten cents per hour.
The job started with the men clearing trees and brush with hand tools: hacksaws, picks, shovels. Then dynamiters came in and blasted rock away so the big power shovels could rough out the road. The blasted rock was either reused to build up sections of road, or carried off in dump trucks. Then with the help of more power shovels, bulldozers and scrapers, the road was finished off to the final grade.
Tom Knox was a power shovel driver, and the man responsible for “Knox Point” or, as we know it today, Vista Point. Tom worked a Bucyrus Erie steam shovel, like the kind used to dig the Panama Canal. But by the time Tom’s Erie found its way from Yellowstone Park road construction to the Beartooth Highway job, it was already ancient. His crewmembers nicknamed it the “Tomato Can,” but Tom seemed proud of the beast. In his wife’s memoir, “They had battled their way through many a rock cut together, always coming out with a good yardage at the end of the shift.” Tom felt particularly proud when the company’s brand-new steam shovel broke down under heavy work and the Tomato Can was called in to finish the job. The brand-new shovel was then dubbed “White Elephant,” with some prankster even painting a white elephant on the side.
